The Good Wife Shocker: Series Delivers Dramatic Ending For Will Gardner [Spoilers]

The Good Wife delivered a shocker on Sunday that had distraught fans taking to Twitter in disbelief.

The surprise came in Episode 15, “Dramatics, Your Honor,” and took a major character off the show for good.

[WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD]

Fans watched in disbelief as Will Gardner, played by Josh Charles, died in the episode. It was such a shock that the term “Not Will” became a trend on Twitter just minutes after the episode finished airing.

CBS anticipated that fans may have a difficult time dealing with The Good Wife shocker, and issued a statement immediately the show aired. The statement explained that after Josh Charles decided to leave the show for other creative endeavors, they decided that instead of sending him off to another location, the appropriate ending would be to kill him off.

The statement read:

Death also created a new dramatic “hub” for the show. We’re always looking for these turning points—some event midway through the season that will spin everybody’s lives in new directions. These turning points keep the show from slipping into a numbing sameness, and keep the characters fresh: because you see how they react to a completely new status quo. Will’s death in many ways becomes a hub for the whole series, violently spinning everybody in new directions.

Finally, we chose the tragic route for Will’s send-off for personal reasons. We’ve all experienced the sudden death of a loved one in our lives. It’s terrifying how a perfectly normal and sunny day can suddenly explode with tragedy. Television, in our opinion, doesn’t deal with this enough: the irredeemability of death. Your last time with the loved one will always remain your last time. The Good Wife is a show about human behavior and emotion, and death, as sad and unfair as it can be, is a part of the human experience that we want to share.

Making it even more difficult was the fact that The Good Wife shocker seemed to come out of nowhere. The episode centered on the trial of Jeffrey Grant, and while much of the episode dealt with DNA evidence and courtroom procedures, it ended with Grant grabbing a court deputy’s gun and going on a shooting spree that left Will Gardner dead.